Campus placements at VIT saw a major hiring by IT firms

New Delhi: Despite all the hype about slowdown in the economy and cut down in hiring by major IT firms, engineering colleges in Tamil Nadu saw quite a successful placement season.

Vellore Institute of Technology (VIT) topped the placement chart with 3,934 offers by major IT firms about 330 more than last year. Accenture gave offers to 1,688 VIT students, while Wipro offered jobs to 1,162 students. Cognizant also gave out offer letters to 1,084 students. The student strength of VIT is around 3,300 students but since many students received multiple offers, actual number of jobs on offer was lower than the quoted number. 2,233 students took up jobs offered to them.

SASTRA College of Engineering has student strength of around 2,200 students. Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) made 965 offers to students this year (higher than 867 offers last year) while Accenture made 310 offers to students this year (higher than 208 last year). Wipro and IBM, however, have been less generous at SASTRA this year. Wipro also handed out 156 offers this year as against 283 offers last year while IBM handed out only 44 offers this year as against 315 offers that they made last year.

SRM University has about 3,800 students looking for placements. TCS was the largest recruiter here by handing out 1,154 offers. Last year, it has only made offers to 858 students. Wipro issued 227 offer letters at SRM, less than 290 that were issued last year. There was not much improvement in salary packages offered here too.

While hiring has not seen much downfall, batch sizes in BTech and BE courses have increased considerably. Hence, the gap between the number of students and the number of job offers is widening. Entry salaries have also stagnated to be around Rs 3.5 lakh for the last few years.